Review: Arctic Silver II Pepsi Challenge

Arctic Silver II Pepsi Challenge

The Arctic silver challenge, like a Pepsi challenge, but this time with some silver in it ;)

Well it has been a while since we did a review of thermal products (paste wise) and a lot of people forget about this. Without thermal paste you can have an issue, a very big issues. So what is arctic silver ? Well it is a thermal compound based on silver content. We saw the revolutionary release of this product around 4 months ago, some sites were saying it wasn’t worth it and it made no difference, but we stuck by it. We had full faith in this product. Since the release of which there has been millions of tubes of it sold, and they have developed 2 new products, the first being Arctic epoxy, this contains the silver paste which is inside the silver paste but it is epoxy based this means that it can be used for attaching ram sinks, and other products using a thermally advanced product. Anyway enough of that lets move on to what you want to know. So first things first lets sort out some stats: -

Arctic silver I Specs

-79% to 82% pure micronized silver content.

-Superior thermal conductivity:
4.65 to 5.15 W/m*K depending on the version and particular batch.

-2 to 7 degrees centigrade lower CPU temperatures than any other thermal compound.

-Negligible electrical conductivity. Arctic Silver was formulated to conduct heat, not electricity. It is only electrically conductive in a thin layer under extreme compression.
(Much safer than silver greases engineered for high electrical conductivity.)

-Net Wt. 6.5 g (0.23oz)

-Comes in a Large Contact Area Tube or Small Contact Area Tube

Arctic Silver II Specs

Made with 99.8% pure micronized silver.

78% to 82% silver content by weight.

Extended temperature limits: - 40C to >160C

New formula insures minimal viscosity change from 0C to 150C

Thermal conductivity greater than 8.0 W/mK

2 to 7 degrees centigrade lower CPU temperatures than other thermal compounds.

Negligible electrical conductivity. Arctic Silver II was formulated to conduct

Well they look different, but are they actually different ? Well I am bewildered.

Look Test: -

We put a small amount of arctic silver paste on to a dish, and on another one we put a little bit of Arctic silver II paste on the same dish, we then compared them, sorry guys they looked exactly the same, we couldn’t see any differences.

Smell Test: -

Well after putting some paste on to the dish we decided to smell it to see if we could tell the difference, unfortunately we couldn’t tell any difference either, now this is starting to get scary.

Taste Test: -

(This is a joke this part,) We didn’t actually taste it, nor could we find a minter to taste test it for us, never mind, we need to find one, if you would like to apply mail us.

They are essentially the same product but with more silver content in the later.

Testing.

We installed this into Hexus's primary test rig, which consists of a 1.2Ghz DDR TBird. We then ran Seti at home on it; we tested it with (Radio Shack stuff)

Results

Well as you would expect the results didn’t show a massive improvement well in fact they didn’t show any, instead what they did show was the same results, and both the arctic silvers out performed the Radio Shack Thermal paste.

Temperatures - 1.2 Ghz /w Core Heat sink and Fan

Well they speak for themselves... it shows a little improvement under load but nothing significant.

Conclusion.

Would I recommend it ? well hell yeah! This product is slightly cheaper than the original because you get less. But even so some might say this is a bad thing, I would say the opposite, this is good. You don’t need much paste at all to do a CPU and with the original product you got enough for a lifetime, but you also paid a lot for it, almost double the price.